CaPpaDoCia (Anatolia)

We went to Cappadoccia in the central Turkish state of Anatolia for 3 days. What an incredible trip. Turkey is divided into seven distinct regions, and Anatolia is certainly the driest and home to some of the first churches in the world. The Hitites lived in this region for a couple of thousand years before Christ, making their homes in beautiful rock formations. Some of these cave dwellings are in monoliths, some in the sides of steep mesas, and others in extremely unique and strange formations. We saw one example of the cave dwellings that was 20 stories high, like an ancient skyscraper. We also descended 8 stories underground into a total hidden underground city where 5,000 people used to live with no sun at all. Intricate ventilation and well shafts all carved into the stone create a sense of space in cramped rooms and tiny passages, made small to prevent knights in shining armor from entering. Even in the well-lit subterranean chambers and passages a sense of claustrophobia and insanity sets in – I can’t imagine living my whole life beneath the earth without the sunlight. Sometimes they would come up, but mostly people stayed below where it was safe from early Christian persecution, then (300 years later) the first Muslim invaders, then (400 years later) the Crusaders. After 1100 AD people stopped living there. I had a hard time understanding why people abandoned the gorgeous caves above ground, but after an hour of descending 10 stories underground into a complete maze and not seeing even 1% of the city, I was ready to surface.

Cappadoccia was just amazing. I had seen cave dwellings in southern Colorado at Mesa Verde and some of the most beautiful land formations in Southern Utah, but this was certainly something else. There are thousands and thousands of these caves, all unique, and some of the earliest churches in the world dating back to 330 AD. From outside, the caves look crude, like funny Dr. Seuss style dwellings in a total imaginative dream world, but the insides were unexpected. With domed roofs and columns, the caves seem like European churches, and many of these churches have Byzantine paintings depicting Bible scenes dating back to Constantine. The paintings of course have been re-applied several hundred times since then, but the style is the same, and entire stories are depicted for the illiterate people of those times. You enter the churches only to step on the graves of the congregation, the dead wishing to still commune with the living. There is no glass, are no guard rails, and no flash photography – there you are, in the oldest Christian churches in a now-Muslim country. Phenomenal. In a few years time I’m sure the tourism in this place will explode.